In some other life, I can hear you

breathing: a pale sound like running

fingers through tangled hair. I dreamt

again of swimming in the quarry

& surfaced here when you called for me

in a voice only my sleeping self could

know. Now the dapple of the aspen

respires on the wall & the shades cut

its song a staff of light. Leave me—

that me—in bed with the woman

who said all the sounds for pleasure

were made with vowels I couldn’t

hear. Keep me instead with this small sun

that sips at the sky blue hem of our sheets

then dips & reappears: a drowsy penny

in the belt of Venus, your aureole nodding

slow & copper as it bobs against cotton

in cornflower or clay. What a waste

the groan of the mattress must be

when you backstroke into me & pull

the night up over our heads. Your eyes

are two moons I float beneath & my lungs

fill with a wet hum your hips return.

It’s Sunday—or so you say with both hands

on my chest—& hot breath is the only hymn

whose refrain we can recall. And then you

reach for me like I could’ve been another

man. You make me sing without a sound.

Under the eaves of the gas-mart—swallows

fall into the day, wheel before the headless 

grooms of the formal wear shop, angle low

as my shoes, then comet up, sheer, careless

of traffic, all that is grounded or down.

A flight of leaf-blown cursives, blue coats

over dashing white, the red-rift of dawn

painted upon their crowns and busy throats.

I must learn to keep them with me, to hold,

somehow, their accomplished joy when I’m gone

to the city where I am mostly old 

and their song, under the noise of hours, is done.

But now, auto exhaust cripples the air

as my grey somnambulant bus draws near.

When Milo was a kitten 

and spent the night

with us in the big bed,

curled like a brown sock

at our feet, he would

wake before daybreak,

squeak plaintively 

in his best Burmese,

cat-castrato soprano,

and make bread on our stomachs

until if one of us did not rise,

sleep-walk to the kitchen

and open his can of food,

he would steal under the covers,

crouch, run hard at us,

jam his head

in our armpits,

and burrow fiercely.

Probably he meant nothing by that.

Or he meant it in cat-contrary,

just as he did not intend

drawing blood the day

he bolted out the door

and was wild again

for nearly three hours.

I could not catch him

until I knelt, wormed

into the crawl-space

under a neighbor house

and lured him home

with bits of dried fish.

Or he meant exactly what he smelled,

and smelled the future

as it transmogrified out of the past,

for he is, if not an olfactory

clairvoyant,

a highly nuanced cat—

an undoer of complicated knots,

who tricks cabinets,

who lives to upend tall

glasses of Merlot.

With his whole body,

he has censored the finest passages of Moby-Dick.

He has silenced Beethoven with one paw.

He has leapt three and a half feet

from the table by the wall

and pulled down

your favorite print by Miró.

He does not know the word no.

When you asked the vet what 

kind of cat it was, she went

into the next room

came back and said,

“Havana Brown.”

The yellow eyes, the voice,

the live spirit that plays into dead seriousness

and will not be punished into goodness,

but no—

an ancient, nameless breed—

mink he says and I answer in cat.

Even if I was not

born in a dumpster 

between a moldy cabbage

and an expired loaf of bread,

I too was rescued by an extravagant woman.

It’s one thing to be hopeful and to be full 

of feathers is another and it’s a third to 

conflate the two and do fourth things

even survive being thought of? 

Five fingers on fire close into a metaphor

about how we’ll never, never ever, never ever.

The smoke above the hospital is beautiful.

The smoke above the hospital was beautiful.

Above the hospital, the smoke looked 

and seemed, its seams dissolved 

into memory which is a terrible way 

to tell time in the cold. I misread 

the “Creve Coeur Camera” sign 

of the shop beside the supermarket 

as “Cri De Coeur Camera” like it is my job

to misread signs. Something beautiful arrived

in a helicopter, something beautiful left

forever. Here we go again, against,

aghast. Something in us floats, floated, 

our feet dragging through future ruins.

I know, “something” is an ulcer 

on any reaching, making intelligence

but the ulcer wants what it wants, to be 

something after all. For an awful whale,

a moment tries to beach itself, it does,

I learn Tomaž has died 

then it is a magnet of terrible power 

when I know for certain Tomaž has died. 

I convalesce, selfish as a branch punished

mildly by wind—Tomaž lived! and will,

but it’s only the kind of enough

nothing ever is. I feel I am being 

ironed, and it all only burns. I feel 

the subtraction machine subtracting

my maneuvers. I feel the abacus 

in my brain, that accordion, finally.

Finally licked into char. Five. Now any chair 

I steal into for any length of time 

has three unsteady legs. Cri cri cri, etc.

It would be a swell time to have a handle on

any methodology for rising into the sky, 

a really great time to turn into a bird. 

What a time! the sun is out and it is snowing

and I am as close to being a plastic sword

as I ever have been. How I would love 

some toddler coming into their tongues

or some beloved ancient to sentence me. 

How I will love the sound 

of my own final clatter, but 

only if it comes when I am tossed aside 

to signal the end of hostilities.

While crossing the river of shorn paper,

I forget my name. My body,

a please leave. I want a patron saint

that will hush the dog growling

at trimmed hedges it sees in the night.

I want the world to be without language,

but write my thoughts down just in case.

Send help, the dog’s growling

won’t let me sleep. I haven’t slept in days.

I am looking for a patron saint, but none

will let me pray for guidance. There is a buzz

in my right ear that never goes away, no matter

how hard I hit the side of my head

for loose change. Most mornings I wonder

who I can pray to that will make sure I never

have to survive waking again. Most nights

I forget to pray the rosary, though I sleep with it

by the bed. I’ve never owned a TV because

I’ll replay this conversation in my head.

My dead lovers are hungry in the kitchen,

so I fix them food they cannot eat. I make toast

of vellum paper, fry an egg made of crepe.

I only want a patron saint to protect me.

I only want someone else to bleed.

You can only hear you look like a hooker so many times

before you become one. Spandex was really big 

the year I stopped believing.

I babysat for the rabbi’s son, Isaac. There was luxe carpet

in every room of the condo. Isaac liked Legos

and we made a pasture and a patriarch and lots of wives.

In his car in his garage the rabbi handed me a self-help book

and put my hand on his crotch, ready to go.

I didn’t care. 

I made good money. 

Isaac lived to be 180 according to the bible. 

Isaac is the only patriarch who didn’t have concubines. 

Isaac is 30 now. Modern scholarship tells us 

the patriarchs never existed. Experience taught me 

the patriarchs are all we’ve got.

The violence done to the mind by the weaponized 

word or image is bad. 

We can live with it, though

We can understand it. Or we can try. And we 

can consider ourselves lucky, which we are. 

Nothing can be understood 

about the blunt-force trauma to the head. 

The percussion grenade. 

The helmet-to-helmet hit at an aggregate speed 

of forty miles an hour. 

No concussion protocol comprehends the self’s 

delicate apparatus crumpled in the wide pan of the brain.

The roof collapsing in Aleppo. 

The beam slamming the frontal lobe. 

The drone, the terror by night and day. 

He wanted to remember it all, 

to fix the image cradled inside the image 

of itself, itself, itself

down the facing mirrors of future and past, 

and then he wanted to be left to die there, 

in the ditch where he was cudgeled

down and under— 

ground water seeping into his mouth,

himself becoming ground water.

But he felt a hand reach down and grab him 

by the collar and yank him back up

and set him on his feet. 

And as he steadied himself, he thought,

This compassion he feels for me as his

mirror enemy, image, brother in wrath, 

and that I feel for him, 

this compassion is the compassion that those 

who see themselves in agony feel. 

But there is the other compassion, the one

felt by those who see agony in themselves,

which the deaf master will feel 

when he imagines us poised and ready to recapitulate

our thinking’s frozen violence—

the great deaf master, 

living in the villa of the deaf, 

where he will paint us in silent pastels.

That streetlight looks like the slicked backbone

            of a dead tree in the rain, its green lamp blazing

like the first neon fig glowing in the first garden

            on a continent that split away from Africa

from which floated away Brazil. Why are we not

            more amazed by the constellations, all those flung

stars held together by the thinnest filaments

            of our evolved, image making brains. For instance,

here we are in the middle of another Autumn,

            plummeting through a universe that made us

from its shattering and dust, stooping

            now to pluck an orange leaf from the sidewalk,

a small veined hand we hold in an open palm

            as we walk through the park on a weekend we

invented so we would have time to spare. Time,

            another idea we devised so the days would have

an epilogue, precise, unwavering, a pendulum

            strung above our heads.  When was the sun

enough? The moon with its diminishing face?

            The sea with its nets of fish? The meadow’s

yellow baskets of grain? If I was in charge

            I’d say leave them there on their backs

in the grass, wondering, eating berries

            and rolling toward each other’s naked bodies

for warmth, for something we’ve yet to name,

            when the leaves were turning colors in their dying

and we didn’t know why, or that they would return,

            bud and green. One of a billion

small miracles. This planet will again be stone.

The river is high. I'd love to smoke pot 

with the river. I'd love it if rain 

sat at my table and told me what it's like 

to lick Edith Piaf's grave. I go along thinking 

I'm separate from trash day 

and the weird hairdo my cat wakes up with 

but I am of the avalanche 

as much as I am its tambourine. 

The river is crashing against my sleep 

like it took applause apart and put it back together 

as a riot of wet mouths 

adoring my ears, is over my head

when it explains string theory 

and affection to me, 

when it tells me to be the code breaker, 

not the code. What does that mean? 

Why does lyric poetry exist?

When will water open its mouth 

and tell us how to be clouds, how to rise

and morph and die and flourish and be reborn

all at the same time, all without caring

if we have food in our teeth or teeth in our eyes

or hair in our soup or a piano in our pockets,

just play the damned tune. The river is bipolar 

but has flushed its meds, I'm dead 

but someone has to finish all the cheese 

in the fridge, we're a failed species

if suction cups are important, if intelligence

isn't graded on a curve, 

but if desperation counts, if thunderstorms 

are the noise in our heads given a hall pass 

and rivers swell because orchestras 

aren't always there when we need them, well then, 

I still don't know a thing.

I turned my back on the color fields.  I turned my back

on the abstract, New York, the blue/red adjustments

and the inflamed men, the men inflated with trust

and acts of god and gorgeous manly man drag.

I turned my back on the furious magazines [I could

read], their reds and blues and frequencies I used

[I could use] to spin myself into an ecstasy, white

dervish, in custody of a story that begins troubled

with power, then the trouble is you as you spin,

a dance that ends with what kind of man I am.

1.

Propped against a tree on a sidewalk next 

to the trash cans, shorn of sheets, its fabric 

a casing for its coils, harborer of secretions 

seeped and dried, its phosphorous surface 

glitters abandoned skin flakes in moonlight, 

shingles from roof sides of humans. Mucous

trails pearlescent from a snail crawled up

the trunk of the tree upon which this bed 

formerly slept on now leans. Loved upon?

Perhaps. Dreamt on most definitely. Hands

on skin most definitely, the stains it harbors

are the trails of dreams, the shotguns aimed

at baby carriages, molars boring holes into 

the palm upon which they are cast like dice,

and the mystery of love as scratchy and fine

smelling as the needle tree that carried you

off with its scent of resin: it’s a hideous thing.

2.

Sheet marks on the face won’t disappear into

the water filling the basin. Under the eyes dark 

lakes before the resinous reflection of window

cast into mirror by interior lights set against

the night. Do you wonder if I dream of your 

shattering? Marks on the face don’t melt into 

the water. It would be strange to dream that 

hard for a stranger, even for you who became 

strange within an hour. Yet, I am waking from 

the press of your face against my face. Carried 

off over the shoulder, hauled through doorways, 

receiving your murder, once this mattress was 

bent at its middle, sagged profuse as a gaping 

blouse, and bore stains of which I was never 

aware while asleep. You knew. You were there 

too. You will dream of congress between us. 

I withdraw my hand. I refuse. Haul me away.

A black-chinned hummingbird lands 

on a metal wire and rests for five seconds; 

for five seconds, a pianist lowers his head 

and rests his hands on the keys; 

a man bathes where irrigation water 

forms a pool before it drains into the river;

a mechanic untwists a plug, and engine oil 

drains into a bucket; for five seconds, 

I smell peppermint through an open window,

recall where a wild leaf grazed your skin;

here touch comes before sight; holding you, 

I recall, across a canal, the sounds of men 

laying cuttlefish on ice at first light;

before first light, physical contact, 

our hearts beating, patter of female rain 

on the roof; as the hummingbird 

whirrs out of sight, the gears of a clock 

mesh at varying speeds; we hear 

a series of ostinato notes and are not tied

to our bodies’ weight on earth.

then i am sprawling in through me

then i am fastened into myself

into my points and my pulls

then i am spinning in rev, in stare

it is a stun and a shunning of this life

it is a slutting of this life

it is a spawning of this moment

i am a promise awake with knowing

a pull in a thread

sprawling

a sputtering

a stuttering

a slant

a song

a rising

a falling

a driving to the edge & waiting

a waiting for the edge to fall

an edging closer to the fall

a wanting the fall to crush

and now i am in the fall

i am the fall

i thank the desire

i kiss the desire

i hold the desire

i thumb the desire

i bite the desire

i thrust the desire

i grind the desire

i rub the desire

it is without oars

& sitting

lulling

circling in a pond

it is the wind tracing

the feet of the kicking beneath that surface

the earth beneath sucking & sucking

that filling of the mouth

that shattering of time

i am bringing myself to a standstill

i am allowing the water to spread

i am afloat in the desire

the desire of me

of you

i am pinning myself to the surface

waiting for the moon to fall

longing for the pierce of stars

tonguing the night

brushing away the darkness

til there is light

around

beneath

inside

til my eyes

open

to the white

of the sky

     1.   I ate eggs from a chafing dish while the baker reminded us: the only thing that will hurt you out here are your own bad decisions

     2.   I felt fettered then un-

     3.   I listened to the rain

     4.   I listened to the rain hitting the Carrier compressor, the gravel walk

     5.   I listened to the rain flattening the clover, I listened to the rain letting up and then it was ozone and drip

     6.   On the bench under the overhang in the rain I let myself pretend I was younger and childless, like the first time I arrived here

     7.   The first time I arrived here, I never thought I am small and luminous

     8.   The body, burdened and miraculous

     9.   The body as thin-nest boundary

     10.   I climbed into your body like a cave

     11.   I was frightened to walk in the dark

     12.   Late at night even my own movements became unknowable, magnified and rustling

     13.   The night cut by the moon, punctured by the whistle of the cargo train

     14.   There was only a hole, there was only forward and more forward

     15.   The inevitability of a scarred life, your pulse, stitches, this palace of breath

     16.   go on, go on / again, again / return, return

<sup>Mudslide in Rio de Janeiro state...: in the early hours of Saturday, following two days of heavy downpour. A boulder slid down a slope and hit a group of houses in the city of Niterói. Volunteers joined rescuers in silence so that any survivors could be heard.

                       —BBC News, November 11, 2018</sup>

It's as if the marrow of the earth mistook us

for part of itself, our limbs its own settling

form, like we have sunk into chairs and taken as us

our tight-tucked legs, our bellies. Or known the settling

head of our daughter to sternum as an uncleaved us,

one sleeping self inside a woken self. The settling

mud around, its heave, seems simple now: is softening us

into dense dark shape, and we are settling

our gauges too: voice from volume, sediment, shadow, us

from the spaces we lived. Silence settling

who we thought we were, was us,

into this all-consuming lack. Nothing settling

a choke around the circumference of light, drawing us

in. We no longer know if our eyes are open, only settling:

(where our daughter sank her pillow—her hair—and us

somewhere too), though we're yielding there to this, settling

aphotic loss, how we once lived what we could bear: us,

her, no more. Now there is weight so true, a settling

so whole, we could die in its lightness: it exiles us

to formless terror—no blanket, no bed, but settling.

If we could remember that once a throat was us

inside a body. Only: here, or here, inside this settling,

a hint of shade, almost like memory: the sound of us. 

If we could just know again our mouths. We 

could part the earth with our voices, ask to be heard.

All poetry is about hope.

A scarecrow walks into a bar.

An abandoned space station falls to earth.

When probing the monster’s brain,

you’re probably probing your own.

A beautiful woman becomes a ghost.

I hope I never miscalculate the dosage

that led to the infarction

of my lab rabbit again.

All poetry is a form of hope.

Not certain, just actual

like love and other traffic circles.

I cried on that airplane too,

midwest patchwork below

like a board game on which

mighty forces kick apart the avatars.

I always wanted to be the racecar

but usually ended up a thumbtack.

When I was young, sitting in a tree

counted as preparation and later

maybe a little whoopie in the morgue.

So go ahead, thaw the alien, break

the pentagram but watch out for

the institutional hood ornaments.

It’s not a museum, it’s a hive.

The blood may be fake

but the bleeding’s not.

We were all Jack Gilbert’s lovers, not in the world

but in the poems, in the world of the poems, dying

on the rocky broken spurs of hard islands in a blue

country across the sea, lovers carried in his arms

for decades sometimes, more, the wind a character

that refused to lift the center of the word pain, where

vowels fall into the letter n the way the summer,

wheat-blazed and feral, pours into the cold weeks

of November, winter in its bones to come. Jack

loved us, not as a god or a devil, however nuanced,

but as one who must attend to the difficult harvest

of a life, to the losses and the simple grain that we might,

if we listen beyond the howling in our own hearts, hear 

him singing about as he carries us up the dead mountain.

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?

          the way it’s scraped off

          those flash-storms of rage

          I grew delicately-feathered

          luna moth antennae

          to fine-tune your emotional weather:

          sometimes a barometric shift

          in the house’s atmosphere / a tight

          quickening / some hard dark shadow

          flickering glossy as obsidian

          pulled down like a nightshade

          behind your irises / but sometimes

          you struck with no warning at all

          rattlesnaked fang of lightning

          incinerating my moon-pale wings

          to crumpled cinder and ash

          now your memory resets

          itself every night / a button

          clearing the trip odometer

          back to zero / dim absinthe fizz

          of radium-green glow

          from the dashboard half-lifing

          a midnight rollover from

          omega to alpha to omega

          I remember when you told me

          (maybe I was three?)

          I was mentally damaged

          like the boy across the street /

          said you’d help me pass

          for normal so no one would know

          but only if I swore to obey

          you / and only you / forever

          now your memory fins

          around and around / like

          the shiny obsessive lassos

          of a goldfish gold-banding

          the narrow perimeters

          of its too-small bowl

          coming home from school

          (maybe I was fifteen?)

          you were waiting for me

          just inside the front door /

          accused me of stealing a can

          of corned beef hash from

          the canned goods stashed

          in the basement / then beat me

          in the face with your shoe

          how do I admit I’m almost glad of it?

          that I’ve always pined for you

          like an unrequited love / though I

          was never beautiful enough

          for you / your tinned bright laugh

          shrapneled flecks of steel to hide

          your anger when people used to say

          we looked like one another

          but now we compare

          our same dimpled hands /

          the thick feathering of eyebrows

          with the same crooked wing

          birdwinging over our left eye /

          our uneven cheekbones making

          one half of our face rounder

          than the other / one side

          a full moon / the other side

          a shyer kind of moon

          how can I admit I’m almost glad of it

          when you no longer recognize

          yourself in photographs

          the mirror becoming stranger

          until one day—will it be soon?—

          you’ll look in my face / once again

          seeing nothing of yourself

          reflected in it, and—unsure

          of all that you were and all

          that you are—ask me: who are you?

Someone had laced the pot,

my date shape-shifting 

in the car’s plush seat. 

I rolled with it, his tongue, 

not sexy or soft, but possibly 

earnest. I must have bit him 

on purpose to regain my breath, 

redirect him away from my throat. 

Get it on, bang a gong, get it on,

his favorite song on the mixtape.

I was a liar, called my parents 

hours later from a distant Finger Lake 

to say I was sleeping at Suzanne’s. 

Is a hydra like the zebra mussel 

taking hold here, forever altering 

the ecology of Keuka and me, half-dressed 

in his younger sister’s top bunk, 

my bony hips against his, 

the popcorn ceiling scraping my back 

each time I was flipped over. 

I’d foreseen this happening 

the second we left the gymnasium 

with its stupid decorations. 

Through the bay window of a child’s room,

the black water licked the dock,

the huge lake a dream

into which I threw my still boyish body.

He wasn’t aware of me, 

nor I of him. How inelegant and sad 

our untangling was, how we’d misremember it.

What I thought was a cat

was a sack of sand.

Someone driving

toward the flood

or where they thought

the flood might go.

That by now

was days ago.

Animals, go home.

I am better when I am dead

or when I am

dreaming.

Having finally entered

the carboned pistons

of your machinery.

You, as a boy,

racing through

the warm excess

of night’s soft decline.

When I rise

I kerosene 

my fingers

place my hands flat

on its weeping

branches.

The music is smashed

Wurlitzer, trashed and drug

up from a landfill

in Tazewell.

Earth mixed with quell

and the bright peal

of a mangled glockenspiel.

In the winter hills

of summer, a sick

foal in the barn,

and an old farmhouse

with all its clocks

pulled out.

Its cold room

filling miraculously

with the slow sediment

of forget.

Because the cathedral leaked yellow light

onto cobblestones like a slit carton of milk.

Because boxes of red wine emptied

down the throat’s swiveling street.

Because the music of my footsteps

like notes of ash.

Because he curved like a question mark

puncturing a flap of heaven.

Because litros tucked in brown paper bags,

two packs of Chesterfields a day, 

at the breakfast table, 

on the lip of a balcony.

Because I woke in a shrine   

of my own stickiness.

Because his lips were aperitif.

Because my father kissed his forehead 

outside the mosque,

the taste of rum and rose petals. 

Because oranges bulging in coat pockets.

Because the condom held against the light,

swirling cities of children we would never conceive.

Because it broke,

the cartography of longing pulsed onto soft thigh.

Because the long walk home chaperoned by stray dogs,

the drunk’s grief of the Guadalquivir,

blue cough and jasmine rotting in my hair.

Because I passed out in the bar bathroom

and mistook the toilet for my mother’s legs.

Because the shard of glass in the singer’s throat.

Because he cried when he was happy.

Because the thief looked me in the eyes and didn’t take the purse.

Because the petroglyphs of our hands wounded the white walls,

how we made the world small,

siphoning god’s breath 

to sweeten the blood-flavored noon.

My two hunting dogs have names, but I rarely use them. As 

I go, they go: I lead; they follow, the blue-eyed one first, then

the one whose coloring—her coat, not her eyes—I sometimes 

call never-again-o-never-this-way-henceforth. Hope, ambition: 

these are not their names, though the way they run might suggest 

otherwise. Like steam off night-soaked wooden fencing when 

the sun first hits it, they rise each morning at my command. Late 

in the Iliad, Priam the king of Troy predicts his own murder—

correctly, except it won’t be by spear, as he imagines, but by 

sword thrust. He can see his corpse, sees the dogs he’s fed and 

trained so patiently pulling the corpse apart. After that, he says,

When they’re full, they’ll lie in the doorway, they’ll lap my blood. 

I say: Why shouldn’t they? Everywhere, the same people who 

mistake obedience for loyalty think somehow loyalty weighs more 

than hunger, when it doesn’t. At night, when it’s time for bed, 

we sleep together, the three of us: muscled animal, muscled animal, 

muscled animal. The dogs settle to either side of me as if each 

were the slightly folded wing of a beast from fable, part power, part 

recognition. We breathe in a loose kind of unison. Our breathing 

ripples the way oblivion does—routinely, across history’s face.